Home (Binti #2)(18)

My window was open and outside a cool desert breeze was blowing in from the west, pushing my orange curtains inward. The current of the breeze disturbed the mathematical current I was calling up. The disturbance caused my mind to weave in a tumble of equations that strengthened what I was trying to do instead of weaken it.

As I hummed, I let myself tree, floating on a bed of numbers soft, buoyant, and calm like the lake water. Just beautiful, I thought, feeling both vague and distant and close and controlled. My hands worked and soon I slid a finger on one of the triangular sides of the edan. It slid open and then slipped off. Inside the pyramid point was another wall of metal decorated with a different set of geometric swirls and loops. Professor Okpala described it as “another language beneath the language.” My edan was all about communication, one layer on top of another and the way they were arranged was another language. I was learning, but would I ever master it?

“Ah,” I sighed. Then I slipped the other triangular side of the pyramid off and the current I called caught both and lifted them into the air before my eyes. “Bring it up,” I whispered and the edan joined the two metal triangles. They began to slowly rotate in the way they always did, the edan like a small planet and the triangles like flat cartwheeling moons. A small yellow moth that had been fluttering about my room attracted to the edan’s glow flew to it now and was instantly caught up in the rotating air.

Was it the presence of the moth, tumbling and fluttering between the metal triangles? I do not know. There was always so much I didn’t know, but not knowing was part of it all. Whatever the reason, suddenly my edan was shedding more triangle sides from its various pyramid points and they joined the rotation. What remained of my edan hovered in the center and from the cavernous serenity of meditation, I sighed in awe. It was a gold metal ball etched with deep lines that formed wild loops but did not touch, reminiscent of fingerprint patterns. Was it solid gold? Gold was a wonderful conductor; imagine how precise the current I guided into it would move. If I did that, would the sphere open too? Or even . . . speak?

The moth managed to break out of the cycle and as soon as it did, my grasp slipped. As Professor Okpala would have said, I fell out of the tree. The mathematical current I’d called up evaporated and all the pieces of my edan fell to the floor, musically clinking. I gasped and stared. I waited for several moments and nothing happened. Always, the pieces rearranged themselves back into my edan, as if magnetized, even when I fell out of the tree.

“No, no, no!” I said, gathering the pieces and putting them in a pile in the center of my bed. I waited, again. Nothing. “Ah!” I shrieked, near panic. I snatched up the gold ball. So heavy. Yes, it had to be solid gold. I brought it to my face, my hands shaking and my heart pounding. I rubbed the pad of my thumb over the deep labyrinthine configurations. It was warm and heavier than the edan had ever felt, as if it had its own type of gravity now that it was exposed.

I was about to call up another current to try to put it back together when something outside caught my eye. I went to my window and what I saw made my skin prickle and my ears ring. I stumbled back, ran my finger over the otjize on my skin, and rubbed it over my eyelids to ward off evil. My bedroom was at the top floor of the Root and it faced the west where my brother’s garden grew, the backyard ended, and the desert began.

“May the Seven protect me,” I whispered. “I am not supposed to be seeing this.” No girl or woman was. And even though I never had up until this point, I knew exactly who that was standing in my brother’s garden in the dark, looking right at me, pointing a long sticklike finger at me. I shrieked, ran to my bed, and stared at my disassembled edan. “What do I do, what do I do? What’s happening? What do I do?”

I slowly stepped back to the window. The Night Masquerade was still there, a tall mass of dried sticks, raffia, and leaves with a wooden face dominated by a large tooth-filled mouth and bulbous black eyes. Long streams of raffia hung from its round chin and the sides of the head, like a wizard’s beard. Thick white smoke flowed out from the top of its head and already I could smell the smoke in my room, dry and acrid. Okwu’s tent was several yards to the right, but Okwu must have been inside.

“Binti,” I heard the Night Masquerade growl. “Girl. Small girl from big space.”

I moaned, breathless with terror. My oldest brother, father, and grandfather had seen the Night Masquerade at different times in their lives. My father on the night he became the family master harmonizer over two decades ago. My oldest brother on the night he’d fought three Khoush men in the street outside the market when they’d wrongfully accused him of stealing the fine astrolabes he’d brought to sell. And my grandfather, when he was eight years old on the night after he saved his whole village during a Khoush raid by hacking the astrolabes of the Khoush soldiers to produce an eardrum-rupturing sound. Only men and boys were said to even have the ability to see the Night Masquerade and only those who were heroes of Himba families got to see it. No one ever spoke of what happened after seeing it. I’d never considered it. I’d never needed to.

I ran to my travel pod and pulled out a small sealed sack I’d used to store tiny crystal snail shells I’d found in the forest near my dorm on Oomza Uni. I dumped them onto my bed, where they crackled and began to turn from white to yellow as they reacted to the dry desert air. I bristled with annoyance. I’d brought the shells to show my sisters and now they’d be dust in a few minutes.